Disclaimer: The Lutheran Educators’ Guild uses the standalone WordPress software. WordPress and its associated companies are not sponsors of the site and the Guild received no compensation for this review.

If any of you are bloggers, you’ve most likely heard of WordPress.  WordPress is one of the most popular blog site software packages.  You can download the free software at http://wordpress.org for installation to your own website hosting service.  What you may not be aware of is that WordPress also offers a free blog hosting service at http://wordpress.com, which is the focus of this review.  I will use the term “WordPress” to refer to the blog software itself and “WordPress.com” to refer to the hosting service.

WordPress.com provides free WordPress blogs to anyone.  Many of the features of a self-hosted WordPress blog are provided.  The major benefit of using WordPress.com to host your blog is that you do not have to be concerned with downloading, configuring, and installing the WordPress software to your own web hosting service.  WordPress.com also maintains backups of all hosted blogs in three geographically separate datacenters and performs regular updates to the WordPress software.

Strengths:

• Multiple blogs and multiple blog authors no charge
• Built-in spam blocking
• Free help and support
• Multiple themes provided
• 3 GB of storage (more can be purchased)

Weaknesses:

• Video embedding requires an additional purchase
• Ad-supported (ads can be removed for a yearly fee)
• 35 user limit on private blogs (can be removed for a yearly fee)
• Minor learning curve

WordPress.com is useful to any educator who would like to add an online component to their classes.  Blogs can be created for each of your classes and since you can have multiple authors for each blog, your students can make blog posts to the class blog.  Students could also be asked to create their own blogs for journals, reflections, or other class assignments.  WordPress.com allows very tight privacy controls so students’ online identities can be protected.

It may take some experimentation to become used to using the various administrative functions in WordPress, but making blog posts is as easy as using a word processing program.  No knowledge of HTML or PHP is required, although the WYSIWYG text editor does have an HTML mode for advanced users.

WordPress.com is free (some premium features are available for additional fees) so all that is needed for access is a computer with Internet access.  New users should plan a few hours for experimentation to familiarize themselves with the WordPress backend.